9
Naturalism: Turn-of-the-Century Modernism
Writing in The Wave, a weekly travel and culture magazine, in June 1896, the young San Francisco writer Frank Norris sought to explain a new form of literature – naturalism – to a well-to-do audience accustomed to lighter fare. “The naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives, and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary,” he writes in “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” “Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death” (Norris 1986e: 1107). “Zola as a Romantic Writer” was not the first of Norris’s forays into the subject; he had earlier that month reviewed Zola’s novel Rome, and the second in his series of generally light courtship sketches called “Man Proposes” portrayed the Zolaesque romance of a coal-heaver and a washerwoman. Accustomed to Norris’s usual writing for the magazine, which often ran to accounts of polo matches, interviews with actresses, and light, facetious short stories, readers of The Wave may have been less receptive to his earnest exposition of the principles of naturalism and the “vast and terrible drama” it portrayed.1 Yet the fact that Norris could even write about such a subject for an audience of socialites says something about the place that naturalism occupied at the turn of the century. By announcing in The Wave that the literature of Zola and his followers would focus not on ordinary middle-class life, the subject of late nineteenth-century realism, but on the “terrible things” and lives “twisted from the ordinary” that were the subject of naturalism, Norris served notice that this literature was worthy of attention even by the complacent upper-middle class. The Wave’s subscribers may not have been adherents of naturalism, and they may not have looked forward to reading sordid descriptions of the lives of the poor, but they were alert to what was fashionably modern, and, in promoting naturalism, Norris strategically positioned naturalism as the literature of the modern age.
Pessimistic in outlook and realistic in observational technique, the naturalism that Norris introduced to his readers portrayed life as reduced to its fundamental elements, the better to understand the underlying motives and physical laws governing human behavior. Following Zola’s “The Experimental Novel,” which in turn derived its method from Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, naturalism in its narrowest sense adopted science as its model and empiricism as its method. But American naturalism encompassed a broader range of writing than that suggested by Zola’s precepts. Although Norris proclaimed himself a disciple of Zola, other naturalistic writers such as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser credited the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Herbert Spencer with their interest in the biological basis for human behavior, whereas Stephen Crane drew on his own experiences in the Tenderloin district of New York for the depictions of the naturalistic urban jungle. In their attempts to bend the methods of science to fiction, however, these writers shared common cause with Zola, for all were determined to represent the truth about life. Works of naturalism pictured a deterministic universe in which life at the margins of society was reduced to the basic imperatives of food, clothing, and shelter; within this environment, human beings displayed the full panoply of primitive drives and emotions, among them sexual desire, greed, jealousy, and rage. In so doing, naturalism mirrored and unmasked the era’s anxieties about the effects of urban life and industrialization, among them the threatened dissolution of the self and the sense of anomie inflicted by the modern city; the precarious physical and social position of those at the bottom of the social scale; the brutish, sometimes violent behavior of people in the grip of elemental emotions; the mingling of blood and ethnic “races” as defined by the philosophically inconsistent yet tendentiously held scientific theories of the day; and the fragility of a sense of personal autonomy, free will, and agency in a world seemingly governed by the forces of heredity and environment. As Frank Norris wrote in one of his last essays, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” “the novel is the great expression of modern life” (Norris 1986c: 1206), and, as a medium of modernity, “an instrument, a tool, a weapon, a vehicle” (p. 1208), it bore the responsibility for transmitting the truth to his own and future ages. Announcing that the “People have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (p. 1210), Norris transforms the novel into a kind of public utility for dispensing truth and the novelist as the trustee of this venture. In linking modernity with its expression in the form of the novel, and the novelist’s responsibility to tell the truth with the interests of the nation, Norris forges naturalism into a technology for representing modernity.
Naturalism is “turn-of-the-century modernism” in its response to the crisis of modernity, since as Tim Armstrong suggests, the definition of modernism is that it is a “cultural expression of modernity” (Armstrong 2005: 4). It does not, however, resemble the classic modernism of the 1920s as exemplified by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, and indeed, naturalism’s approach was diametrically opposed to that of classic modernism. First of all, whereas modernists of the 1920s focused on rendering subjective states of consciousness, the naturalists struggled to render objectively the states of being that they observed and tried to do so with scientific objectivity; the works of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Jack London are filled with terms borrowed from science. It is this focus on external reality rather than internal states of being that Virginia Woolf critiques in the well-known essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Famously observing that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” (Woolf 1928/1970: 3), she goes on to castigate the British realist novelist Arnold Bennett and his fellow Edwardians, like John Galsworthy, for their focus on the external appearance and financial condition of her fictional Mrs Brown rather than the rich interior life of emotion that she represents. Woolf’s exasperation with the Edwardians’ fascination with physical and financial details – “hot-water bottles” and “freehold villas and copyhold estates” (p. 23) in Woolf’s terms – echoes the modernists’ impatience with realist observation as a methodology. Moreover, the naturalists’ insistence on accumulating incidents and details as a key to understanding life was anathema to Woolf and the other modernists. For the modernists, representing the cultural certainties shattered by World War I required an equal fragmentation and dislocation of narrative method, and attempting to represent the totality of an experience, as the naturalists did, was seen as at best naive and at worst presumptuous or dishonest. Naturalism, and its later counterpart the social problem novel of the Progressive Era, were exhibits A and B of the kind of fiction that modernists were determined not to write. The modernists’ interests lay in the aesthetic rather than the pragmatic dimensions of life, the stylistically sophisticated rather than the earnestly realistic mode in matters of style, the individual rather than the type in matters of character, and the interior and psychological rather than the externally described and biological basis for human behavior. In short, although both movements respond to a crisis of modernity, classic modernism inverts the principles of classic naturalism.
To understand naturalism as an expression of turn-of-the-century modernity, as Norris did, requires an understanding of the multiple and conflicting visions of the movement both by its practitioners and its critics. Naturalism in the United States had no school, no group of artists formally committed to its principles as was the case with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the American transcendentalists of the 1840s and 1850s. Even the term “naturalism” was in dispute, with some critics labeling as realism any fiction not directly identifiable as romantic, from the genteel fiction of W. D. Howells to the sensational and sordid dramas of Zola, whereas others, like Zola himself, called all such works “naturalistic” that aligned themselves along “the positivistic orientation of philosophical naturalism” (Link 2004: 15). Nor did twentieth-century critics have a sharper or more consistent definition of the movement. As Charles Child Walcutt commented in 1956, “Shocking, bestial, scientific, messianic – no sooner does [naturalism’s] outline seem to grow clear than, like Proteus, it slips through the fingers and reappears in another shape” (Walcutt 1973: 3). Generally speaking, naturalism meant turn-of-the-century literature that dealt with lower-class urban characters in whom primitive traits roiled beneath a thin veneer of civilization. Pressed by forces of heredity and environment not only beyond their control but beyond their understanding, these characters were pushed to the limits of endurance. They responded to the sordid, frightening, and altogether compelling circumstances in which they found themselves by striking out in desperate ways unacceptable to their middle-class audience: through drinking or taking drugs, resorting to prostitution or theft, or lashing out in violent ways, even committing murder on occasion.
Within these general outlines, however, critical perspectives on naturalism differ. For example, George Becker’s definition of naturalism as “pessimistic materialistic determinism” in his introduction to Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Becker 1963: 35) summed up naturalism’s principal philosophical framework, yet as Donald Pizer points out, naturalism consists of two tensions not accounted for by such a definition: first, despite naturalism’s lower-class characters, the naturalist author portrays “those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous” (Pizer 1984: 11) and second, naturalists depict a “compensating humanistic value” (p. 12) in their characters, both traits at odds with pessimism and determinism. Nor was there agreement about naturalism’s origins: critics such as Richard Lehan have traced its principal ideas to Zola and French writers, whereas Donald Pizer and others have emphasized its roots in American culture. Malcolm Cowley denigrated the naturalists’ style, saying that the naturalists have “all used language as a blunt instrument” as if such an observation were a critical commonplace (1947/1998: 238), yet Lee Clark Mitchell (1989) has demonstrated a rhetorical subtlety in such works as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” More recently, Jennifer Fleissner has challenged the conventional reading of the naturalist plot as one of inevitable decline, arguing instead that its true movement is repetition, a focus on “an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion … that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place” (Fleissner 2004: 9). Finally, even the mode of naturalism has caused controversy: for some critics, including early reviewers, naturalism seemed a debased version of realism, a type of hyperrealism that dwells on the unpleasant details of life, while for Norris and Dreiser, its coincidences, improbable happenings, and “twisted from the ordinary” circumstances placed it in the realm of romance.
But these debates are secondary to the more central issues of the writers’ relationship to naturalism, to the literary climate of their times, and to contemporary discourses of nationalism and modernity. Although the novels of Norris, Crane, London, and Dreiser share certain naturalistic themes, variations in their approaches to questions of naturalism and modernity become evident when their work is examined more closely. In what ways did the naturalists themselves articulate, directly through their critical statements or indirectly through their work, their relation to naturalistic theory? To what extent did they see themselves as in conversation with contemporaries or predecessors who shared their ideas about evolution, atavism, degeneration, and race? Moreover, how did these writers conceptualize their writings as modern if not “modernist” – in other words, as a response to the crisis of modernity? And finally, to what extent was their writing of naturalism a bracing corrective to a nation envisioning itself as a bastion of material progress and prosperity, rather than as a country in which social, governmental, industrial, scientific, and racial forces conspired to crush the individual? To a certain extent, naturalism emerged from the crisis of modernity to become a literature of paradoxical anxieties that undercut supposedly scientific laws about human nature. Despite the belief in biologically determined gender categories, for example, naturalism expresses anxieties about the survival of masculinity under the twin threats of the New Woman and the feminization engendered by overcivilization. The burgeoning underclass should have posed no threat to the supposedly invincible Anglo-Saxon, according to the era’s theories of race, yet naturalism resounds with fears about increasing class mobility and the threat posed by teeming masses of ethnic and racial others. Furthermore, if human beings were already biological machines governed by heredity and environment, increasing mechanization and industrialization should have caused no anxiety, since these would add but one more determinant to humankind’s already predestined fate, yet anxiety about this, too, runs like a dark thread through naturalist texts. Exploring the dimensions of naturalism, then, means examining the movement not only in terms of what naturalistic writers believed themselves to be doing but also in terms of the anxieties over modernity that run through their writing. To illustrate turn-of-the-century fiction through these intersections of naturalism and modernity, it is useful to consider the practice of naturalism along four of the dimensions that commonly characterized the movement: its intellectual roots in Zola’s naturalism and Howells’s realism, as demonstrated in Norris’s approach through scientific and literary theories; its focus on women’s experiences and its experimental style, as shown in the work of Stephen Crane; its representations of modernity, anomie, and desire in the urban environment, as seen in Dreiser’s use of the city as a determining force; and its examination of the forces of poverty and ethnicity in working-class lives, as shown in the work of Jack London. In addition, brief comparisons of these naturalist writers with others less generally recognized as writing naturalism, such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Anzia Yezierska, demonstrate the elasticity and usefulness of naturalism as a strategy for representing modernity.
Frank Norris is the American author most commonly identified as a naturalist writer, and with good reason: from “Zola as a Romantic Writer” through the essays collected and published posthumously as The Responsibilities of the Novelist, Norris was the movement’s most visible theorist and practitioner. Moreover, Norris, unlike his contemporaries, repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Zola and French naturalism. For example, in addition to his championing of Zola in the pages of The Wave, Norris playfully referred to himself as the “boy Zola” (Crisler 1986: 160) in a letter to his friend Isaac Marcosson, an allusion not only to his professed admiration for Zola but also to the critics’ consistent comparison of him to the French proponent of naturalism. Norris construed naturalism as a form flexible enough to represent what was most significant about life: the extraordinary events residing even within the realm of the commonplace. He believed that “Naturalism is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism” (Norris 1986f: 1108), and that, like the work of Victor Hugo, Zola’s work had “enormous scenic effects, the same love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic” (p. 1108). Zola is not a realist but “the very head of the Romanticists” (1986c: 1166), and, unlike the false and bombastic romancers writing of ages past, he takes as his subject contemporary life or the recent past. Norris was a critic, however, not an unthinking disciple, for when Zola failed to live up to his own principles by indulging in explicit social commentary, as he did in Fécondité, Norris was quick to point out the problem: its “sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading, [and] a farrago of dry, dull incidents” show that even Zola nods on occasion (Norris 1986a: 1198). Yet although he chose different features of Zola’s novels to praise throughout his career, Norris consistently looked to Zola as a touchstone for his own practice of naturalism.
If Zola represents one pole of Norris’s theorizing about naturalism, William Dean Howells represents the other, and Norris consistently compared the two in his reviews. The premier literary critic of his day, Howells championed realism first as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and then, from 1886 to 1892, as the serious if avuncular voice of the “Editor’s Study” columns for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Several of Howells’s words echo in Norris’s essays. For example, to a late nineteenth-century reader, the repeated use of “common” in Norris’s statement about a literature “twisted from the ordinary” would have gained added resonance from its use in the realism promoted by Howells. Realism, Howells had declared, is “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” taken from life (Howells 1889: 966), a literature that shows “the light of common day” (Howells 1901: 227). It signifies a commitment to representing the real rather than the ideal, a distinction that Howells demonstrates in his allegory of the real and the ideal grasshopper in an “Editor’s Study” column from December 1887. To show that artists are discouraged from taking subjects from life and are taught instead to worship an abstract ideal, Howells imagines a conversation in which the art establishment suggests copying a wire-and-cardboard model of a grasshopper rather than a real grasshopper. No one, Howells argues, would give a scientist this model and propose that he study that instead of a real one, yet imitating ideal models is standard advice given to artists and writers. Like the scientist, the artist should instead study from life (a principle of naturalism), and, when told that “The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace,” should persevere because “the simple, natural, and honest” should be the standard for art (Howells 1887: 155). Norris, too, believed that the artist should be like the scientist and look directly at life, but, as with Zola, his discipleship under Howells went only so far. In “Theory and Reality,” Norris praised Howells’s A Parting and a Meeting and A Modern Instance for their respective treatment of sexual desire and sexual jealousy – or, as he put it more delicately for the readers of The Wave, the “dangerous subject” of “the ultimate physical relation of man and woman” (Norris 1986d: 1103). Yet he chides Howells for limiting his treatment to characters who are “well behaved and ordinary and bourgeois” (p. 1106), instead of representing the extraordinary characters and events that constitute naturalism. Even the term “commonplace” undergoes a transformation: Howells implies that it is a term of opprobrium and suggests instead that it be adopted with pride as signifying the real (“the simple, natural, and honest”), but for Norris the Howellsian “commonplace” could be only a point of departure for a naturalistic treatment of material. Norris also parsed Howells’s use of the word “truthful,” as in “the truthful treatment of material,” until it, too, underwent a sea change. He dissects the meaning of “truth” and “accuracy” in his weekly letter for the Chicago American Literary Review in 1901, using, like Howells, the example of an animal to illustrate his point. If the novelist faithfully depicts a black sheep as representative of the whole, Norris argues, his picture is accurate, because the animal is indeed a sheep, but such a picture is not true because it leaves the false impression that all sheep are black. In Norris’s terms, accuracy is less desirable in literature than truth, which may eschew mere accuracy in its quest to convey a true picture. Adding to the realism/naturalism and realism/romanticism binaries he has already established, Norris proposes that “Accuracy is realism and Truth romanticism,” with naturalism at its best encompassing both (Norris 1901/1986: 1142). Versed in the proper relation – Norris’s relation – between truth and romanticism, novelists need not “take up that harsh, loveless, colorless, blunt tool called Realism” (Norris 1986b: 1166) but can instead use naturalism as a technology for representing contemporary life.
In his novels, too, Norris was a proponent of naturalism, although his practices changed over the course of his career. The novels considered his best each present a slightly different perspective on naturalism: McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903). Of these, McTeague adheres most closely to the Zola of L’assommoir, with its depictions of alcoholism, poverty, and brutality, but the perspective was Norris’s own. Inspired by newspaper accounts of an Irish laborer murdering his charwoman wife in a kindergarten, Norris began to write the sketches later incorporated into McTeague as a series of daily themes for Lewis Gates’s English 22 class at Harvard, earning comments such as “gruesome” from his grader but apparently praise from Gates himself.2 McTeague exemplifies Zola’s method of experimenting with characters and their environment as the primary basis for the naturalistic novel; like other such works, it quickly reaches a point of balance and gradually descends into chaos and death. Like L’assommoir, McTeague features long stretches of equilibrium, usually summed up in a chapter or elided in phrases such as “three years passed” punctuated by abrupt catastrophes and descents into a lower level of existence. McTeague, a dentist in the working-class district of Polk Street in San Francisco, exists in a state of near-somnolent stasis until he is struck by twin calamities masquerading as luck: the first is meeting Trina Sieppe, the woman he will marry; and the second is incurring the enmity of his friend and Trina’s former suitor, her cousin Marcus Schouler, when Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery. These two events arouse the elemental emotions of desire – on McTeague’s part, for sex and, on Trina’s, for money – that tap into a biological heritage of addiction for each. Operating on an anesthetized Trina, McTeague is overcome by the spectacle of her helplessness and by an inner brute, “long dormant” but “now at last alive,” that causes him to kiss her “grossly, full on the mouth” (Norris 1899/1997: 22). It is the first but by no means the last appearance of the brute, called to life here by the “foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer” (p. 22) that flowed in his veins. The brute emerges again when McTeague abandons beer for whiskey, which “roused the … brute in the man and … goaded it to evil” (p. 169). For Trina, the tipping point occurs not when she wins the $5,000 but when she marries McTeague and gives herself to him sexually; as Barbara Hochman suggests, she seeks to replace what she has lost by saving “another treasure” (Hochman 1988: 70), her money, replacing the sexuality that she cannot control with the money that she can. Like McTeague’s hereditary “foul taint,” Trina’s German-Swiss ancestry predisposes her to a miserliness that she at first dismisses as a “good fault” (Norris 1899/1997: 141) until she is as addicted to money as McTeague is to alcohol.
Environment as well as heredity plays a role, for what precipitates their decline is living in a modern economy governed by the appearance of things rather than the things themselves. The modern economic system of exchanging pieces of paper, such as diplomas, licenses, certificates, or banknotes, that represent respectively knowledge, power, and money, ruins the McTeagues and becomes increasingly irrelevant to them as they descend the economic ladder. When Marcus Schouler spitefully reports McTeague’s lack of a license to practice dentistry to the authorities, all of McTeague’s protests – “I’ve been practicing for ten years” (Norris 1899/1997: 146) – will not allow the substance, his knowledge of dentistry and practical experience in it, to substitute for the piece of paper that certifies the substance. Events in the novel put the lie to one piece of paper after another, from the “Made in France” stickers Trina adds to the Noah’s Ark animals she whittles and the “non-poisonous paint” she uses to finish them, to the happy wedding photograph of the McTeagues. The ultimate rejection of the world of representation for the world of things occurs when Trina feels driven to exchange the paper promise of money for the gold it represents: she exchanges a draft drawn on the $5,000 she has deposited for investment with her Uncle Oelbermann for gold, which she hoards. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, McTeague and Trina “are united in their distaste for ‘representative’ paper” (Michaels 1987: 151), but Trina goes a step further in literally transferring her sexual desire from McTeague to the gold, spreading it in her bed and “taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body” (p. 198). After brutally murdering Trina by beating her to death, McTeague returns to the Western mining country of his youth, a land in which actions and gold, not paper representations of them, hold meaning. Although he is now a natural man in a natural landscape, a site at last suited to his brute strength and instincts, McTeague’s determination to carry Trina’s gold with him dooms him, for gold is the one signifier that holds its value in wild as well as civilized spaces. Hearing of the murder, Marcus Schouler follows McTeague, although he is driven more by the thought of McTeague’s possession of Trina’s gold, gold that Marcus believes was his by right, than by a desire for justice. The two men meet in Death Valley, and, their water gone, fight pointlessly over Trina’s gold. After killing Marcus with blows from his “fists, hard as wooden mallets” (p. 243), McTeague discovers that Marcus has handcuffed himself to him. Symbolism in naturalist novels is not always a subtle affair; as reviewers and critics have noted, the gold symbolism in McTeague is pervasive, with McTeague’s canary, the gold tooth that signifies his profession, and Trina’s money all amplifying its significance. Norris’s concluding image is equally forceful and symbolic. McTeague is left sitting in the middle of a deadly environment, chained literally as well as figuratively to a body that his limitations have never allowed him to escape.
Norris’s last two major novels, The Octopus and The Pit echo expansive social problem novels such as Zola’s Germinal and La Terre rather than L’assommoir. Both The Octopus and The Pit were part of Norris’s plan for a trilogy concerning the production, sale, and distribution of wheat as a “great and resistless force moving from west to east, from producer to consumer” (Crisler 1986: 173), a plan cut short when Norris died in October 1902 before the publication of The Pit. In scope and subject matter, The Octopus marked a departure from the severe confines of McTeague’s classic plot of naturalistic decline, for although, like the murder in McTeague, the novel was inspired by an actual event, the Mussel Slough battle between Southern California farmers and railroad operatives in 1880, Norris transforms the event into a commentary on everything from the role of the artist to inevitable triumph of the wheat and the market forces that make its dissemination possible. At the beginning of The Octopus, Presley, Norris’s artist alter ego, seeks a fit subject for his projected American epic and believes he has found it in his vision of the West and its land as a “colossus, benignant, eternal, strong, the nourisher of nations, the feeder of an entire world” (1986b: 614). As he walks across the land at night, his naive literary longings shatter when he watches as an equally titanic force, a “crack passenger engine” (p. 616), thunders across the land and slaughters a flock of innocent sheep that have wandered onto the track. The episode literally and symbolically shows the modern age murdering the pastoral age of Presley’s imaginings, with the train, the novel’s symbol of the “monster” of technological modernity, impersonally destroying the natural world. The rest of the novel presses the point home, with its set pieces of physical carnage, such as the organized massacre of jackrabbits caught by an ever-tightening circle of farmers, anticipating the farmers’ own extinction when caught in the arms of the octopus, the Southern Pacific railway that feeds on their toil in building up the land. Of all Norris’s characters, only Vanamee, the mystic philosopher of The Octopus, transcends both time and modernity through a belief in reincarnation that restores to him his lost love, Angele, in the person of her daughter. “Men were naught, death was naught, life was naught; FORCE only existed,” Presley thinks in The Octopus (Norris 1986b: 1084), and it is the examination of this world of forces, modernity among them, that marks Norris as a classic naturalist.
The same clash of forces animates The Pit, which in its equation of business speculation and the marriage market recalls Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. In The Pit, the wheat for which the ranchers fought and died in The Octopus is traded in the Pit of the title, the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Like W. D. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Pit juxtaposes a romance plot, the marriage of its protagonists, Curtis Jadwin and Laura Dearborn, with a business plot, Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market in wheat. His attempts to control both Laura and the market illustrate, as does The Octopus, the impossibility of controlling one’s destiny in the midst of a world ruled by overwhelming forces, in this novel the forces of the marketplace and Jadwin’s addiction to trading and speculation. In both novels, Norris’s true subject is a naturalistic examination of human desire when confronted with the Frankenstein’s monster of outsized forces, whether technological or economic, that humankind has created and set in motion but can no longer control. The unavoidable monster, as Norris saw it, was not time, with its inevitable progress toward death, but modernity, created from the human compulsion to regulate and resist time’s dictates, as one more force in the world of forces that govern the lives of human beings. The addiction to speculation and its causes, the underlying attempt to stop time, that Norris gives to Jadwin is also the tragic flaw of Lily Bart, Wharton’s protagonist in The House of Mirth. Born into a social position that she has the breeding but not the money to maintain, Lily, at age 29, has only one means of livelihood open to her: to marry a wealthy man. Her beauty and charm would seem to render this an easy goal to reach, but Lily, like Jadwin, has a fatal propensity for speculating in the marketplace, in her case the marriage market. Having captured the attention of the rich but dull Percy Gryce, she overplays her hand by ignoring him in favor of flirting with the much poorer lawyer Lawrence Selden, who is repeatedly drawn to Lily but chooses not to marry her. Unable to capitalize on her assets by an innate disdain for the shallow society that constitutes her world, Lily descends the social ladder by making one disastrous choice after another, pressed by social forces that she can set in motion but cannot control. By the end of the novel, Lily, like Crane’s Maggie Johnson, has spent time in sewing for a livelihood and later slips into poverty and death. Like Maggie, too, she is better than her surroundings, but her finer sensibilities only demonstrate her failure to adapt and survive, a circumstance that Wharton describes in Darwinian language as Lily recognizes that she is “a mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them” (Wharton 1905/1990: 248).
Stephen Crane, like Kate Chopin, explored the workings of naturalistic determinism through gender, and, like Chopin, showed a sophisticated grasp of style and symbolism. As he explained in an inscription in Hamlin Garland’s copy of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the book “tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people” (Crane 1988: 53). Unlike Norris, however, Crane liked to present himself as sui generis, an author who worked primarily without models in the service of truth: “I developed all alone a little creed of art which I thought was a good one. Later I discovered that my creed was identical with the one of Howells and Garland … ” (p. 63). Despite his friend Joseph Conrad’s comment that Crane “knew little of literature, either of his own country or any other” (Sorrentino 2006: 250), according to James Nagel, Crane read “Anatole France, Henry James, George Moore, Mark Rutherford, Bierce, Hardy, Twain, and Kipling” (Nagel 1980: 20), a list that, as Nagel indicates, does not include such contemporaries and friends as Harold Frederic, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. Nor does Crane mention French influences, despite the recollection of his friend and roommate Frederic M. Lawrence that collections of de Maupassant’s stories and a book by Zola were among their possessions (Sorrentino 2006: 116).3 Less extensive and specific than Norris’s, Crane’s theorizing about naturalism shares one important value with that of Norris: that representing life as it is really lived by prostitutes and others disdained by middle-class society reveals truths about the human condition inaccessible to standard varieties of realism, and that such representation must follow not the middle-class practice of Howells’s fiction but the spirit of his realism, with its belief that, as Crane paraphrased it, “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth” (Crane 1988: 63). Despite misgivings over dialect and profanity not seen in his own works, Howells hailed Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, calling it “the best thing he did” (Howells 1900/1973: 62) and finding it superior even to the novel usually considered Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage. The Red Badge of Courage has its naturalistic moments, most notably in its ironic description of a peaceful chapel-like forest in which sits a filmy-eyed dead man over whose gray-skinned face “ran little ants” (Crane 1984b: 126). But Crane’s slum sketches and tales, particularly Maggie, not only reveal his understanding of the deterministic coordinates of gender but also illustrate the ways in which his impressionistic style anticipates those of twentieth-century authors.
First published privately in 1893 at Crane’s expense and later reissued in a bowdlerized edition by Appleton in 1896 after the success of The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets both derives from and rejects the slum story popular at the time. It is contemporary in its subject matter and, like the rest of Crane’s work, distinctly modern in its ironic, impressionistic style. As Keith Gandal (1997) demonstrates in The Virtues of the Vicious, unlike slum tales such as Edward Townsend’s A Daughter of the Tenements or Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets, Crane used the ethnographic perspective of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives to critique the conventional nineteenth-century moral tale of reformation. Moreover, Maggie’s origins, as George Monteiro shows in Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, are set firmly in the temperance tracts and poems of Crane’s youth, whose “familiar paradigms” he used “without always seeing how the mediation of those paradigms and that rhetoric also worked to shape (and occasionally limit) his ability to see the reality around him” (Monteiro 2000: 34). In Maggie, Crane deflates the conventional elements of slum tales and temperance tracts, such as Maggie Johnson’s tenement upbringing, her seduction, her turn to prostitution, and her death. As Alan Trachtenberg succinctly puts it, it is “a complicated piece of parody written with a serious regard for the task of rendering a false tale truly” (Trachtenberg 1982: 145). Crane’s emphasis on environment over heredity is apparent in his choice of heroine, for Maggie seems to inherit few characteristics from her monstrously drunken mother and abusive father; instead, she is a genetic anomaly, a pretty girl who “blossomed in a mud puddle” (Crane 1984a: 24) and takes steps to impose order and beauty on her ugly and disorderly world. But biology disguised as romantic desire begins the corrective process of inducting Maggie into the mean streets of her birth when she meets Pete, her brother Jimmie’s friend and a bartender whose saloon is the cleanest and most orderly space in the novel. In due course, Pete introduces her to culture, in the form of trips to the Central Park Menagerie, the Museum of Art, and a vaudeville show; seduces her, and leaves her for another, after which she takes to the streets. When she reemerges as “a girl of the painted cohorts” (p. 70) after a period of months, she accosts an increasingly unpleasant series of potential male clients until she stands by the “deathly black hue” of the river with “a huge fat man” whose “whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish” (p. 72). Unlike the traditional “girl who went wrong,” Maggie neither bears an illegitimate child nor succumbs to disease, yet her fate is sealed by her mother’s hypocrisy in throwing her out of the house, and, by extension, by the entire hypocritical social system that regards her as unclean, like the “stout gentleman in a silk hat and a chaste black coat” (p. 69) who avoids Maggie. The environmental forces that ruin her are thus as much social as biological, with Crane indicting “the false moral environment” imposed on her life rather than her physical environment for her death (Pizer 1984: 151).
Crane’s approach to modernity is evident in his modern use of stylistic impressionism and irony as well as in his subject matter. Commenting on Crane’s “carefully-chosen details, his insistence on the main theme, and his avoidance of irrelevance,” an anonymous reviewer for Literature concludes that “Mr. Crane is an Impressionist, and not a mere descriptive writer” (“Crane’s Defective Impressionism” 1898/1973: 218), a judgment echoed by other contemporaries. Crane’s almost cinematically objective point of view in some scenes in Maggie helps to render her life impressionistically, as does what James Nagel calls the “juxtaposition of two or more narrators describing the same pattern of events” (Nagel 1980: 24), a technique Crane uses when contrasting Pete’s seduction of Maggie with her brother Jimmie’s avoidance of women he has seduced. Such juxtapositions also contribute to the novel’s use of irony, which is evident at the level of theme as well as style. For example, Maggie’s innocence ironically leads to her downfall because she is unable to distinguish the romantic from the real. She clothes Pete in the garb of a shining knight and does not understand his shortcomings, just as she is unable to grasp the concept of the ventriloquist’s dummies until Pete tells her that they are “some damn fake” (Crane 1984a: 32). More pointedly ironic is her drunken, monstrous mother’s hypocritical espousal of middle-class morality, for when “the red, writhing body of her mother” tells Maggie “Go teh hell an’ good riddance,” the narrator simply reports, “She went” (p. 41). Discarded by Pete some time later with the same instructions – “Go teh hell” – she puts a single question to herself: “Who?” (p. 69). Read both as “Who will take care of me?” and “Who am I?” it is virtually her last word in the novel, except for the inconsequential “Ah, there” with which she accosts potential clients. “Who?” registers her recognition that she has lost both name and self in her struggle for survival. Subsumed by the modern city, which reads her as a series of types, Maggie loses her individuality and eventually her life.
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening traces the similarly limited choices of its heroine, Edna Pontellier, within a modern deterministic universe. As well-to-do and privileged as Maggie is poor, Edna, too, is something of an outsider in her surroundings: her St Louis roots have not prepared her for the Creole traditions of New Orleans and the summer community at Grand Isle. She cannot read Creole customs accurately and mistakes its culture of courtly flirtation for one of sensuality, a misreading that in part causes her to fall in love with Robert Lebrun. Leaving her husband and children behind during a day trip to the lush, tropical island of Chênière Caminada, Edna falls asleep and wakes up to a renewed sense of herself as an individual. Edna’s awakening is intellectual and emotional as well as sexual, for in addition to her infatuation with Robert, she responds to Mademoiselle Reisz’s piano playing with “a keen tremor down [her] spinal column” accompanied by “an impress of the abiding truth” (Chopin 2006: 906). Although she is seduced by the practiced roué Alcée Arobin, Edna’s true declaration of independence consists in leaving the home of her husband and children for a smaller “pigeon-house” in which she is free to paint and to be herself. But despite her privileged existence, Edna can no more escape the confines of biological forces and social disapprobation than Maggie can. She tells her friend Dr Mandelet that “it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (p. 996), but her awakening leads her only to the recognition that she never can escape, given the culture she inhabits. Reflecting that “To-day it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else” (p. 999), Edna imagines a parade of lovers rather like Maggie’s parade of clients, a recognition that leads her, like Maggie, to death by drowning. But Edna chooses her fate, an affirmative act. Having learned to swim after being afraid of the water, Chopin’s symbol not only for sexual experience but for the entire experience of life, Edna sheds her clothes as she has shed society’s conventions and swims far from shore, becoming one with nature but only achieving this union in death.
Theodore Dreiser and Paul Laurence Dunbar identify the modern city as the intersection of modernity and human experience that comprises the subject matter of naturalism. Although in Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s first novel, Carrie Meeber finds rather than loses her individuality in the city, Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy illustrates the integration and disintegration of the self through the forces of American culture. Like Carrie, he is a “waif amid forces,” drawn by, and to a large extent shaped by, the trappings of modernity he encounters in the modern city. Drawn, like Norris’s McTeague, from a murder case, An American Tragedy borrows heavily from the 1906 drowning of the pregnant Grace Brown at the hands of Chester Gillette in upstate New York, even using verbatim accounts from the Gillette trial in the novel. The book is an inevitable tragedy of aspiration, arranged in three acts. Book One follows Clyde, the rootless son of itinerant evangelists, as he leaves Kansas City after an automobile accident in which he was implicated. In Book Two, Clyde arrives in Lycurgus, New York, the home of his uncle Samuel Griffiths, a wealthy manufacturer. Finding himself shut out from the social world of the Griffiths, Clyde seduces a factory girl, Roberta Alden; when his American dream seems about to be realized through the love of the upper-class Sondra Finchley, Clyde is dragged back to earth by Roberta’s untimely pregnancy. Trapped by biology and by the social opprobrium that would render his eventual marriage to Sondra impossible, he makes plans to take Roberta on a trip to Big Bittern Lake, with the thought of drowning her. As he sits in a canoe with Roberta in a deserted section of the lake, however, Clyde vacillates about his actions, wanting to be rid of Roberta but reluctant to take the necessary steps to murder her. When Roberta leans toward him, he accidentally strikes out at her with the camera in his hand, hitting her in the face and overturning the boat; he then swims to shore as she drowns. Although Clyde believes he has not technically murdered Roberta, he is nonetheless convicted of murder by an ambitious district attorney, sentenced to death, and executed in the electric chair, the legal processes that comprise Book Three.
In adapting the Gillette case, Dreiser emphasized its ambiguities in order to focus attention less on Clyde’s guilt than on society’s in promoting an impossible ideal and to explore the forces at work upon Clyde’s character. In naturalistic terms, Clyde is a reactive rather than an active character, pushed as he is in multiple directions by internal and external forces, including those symbolized by Roberta and Sondra. Yet as Joseph Karaganis points out, in addition to classic determinants such as “instinct, mechanism, the sex drive, [and] survival of the fittest” (Karaganis 2000: 160), Clyde is driven by the peculiarly modern desire for “spectacularity” or celebrity, the pleasure of being seen (p. 165). As Warren Susman (1984) notes in “ ‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” the early decades of the twentieth century marked a shift from a culture of character, marked by concepts such as duty, moral order, and responsibility to community, to one of personality, with its overtones of expressive individualism and primacy of the self. Dreiser renders this shift graphically in Book Two when Clyde is buffeted alternately by letters from Sondra and Roberta, the former written in a cloying baby-talk that reeks of personality and modernity, and the latter evocative of old-fashioned sentimental appeals to character and Clyde’s duty to her (see Rhodes 1996). Clyde’s commitment to personality rather than to character, to Sondra rather than to Roberta, marks him both as modern and as insubstantial. This trait is also emphasized in Clyde’s engagement with the visual commercial culture that surrounds him. Before moving to Lycurgus, Clyde works as a bellhop at the Green-Davidson Hotel in Kansas City, and after the visual impoverishment of the drab street corners of his childhood, the sumptuousness and sensuality of the hotel, with its variety of people and its constant movement, enchants him. At the Green-Davidson, his job is to watch doors and the scenes within the rooms, as he will later watch both the home of his relatives, the Griffiths family, and of Sondra, who works hard at being a spectacle worth watching by flourishing props such as her pet dog or her red Spanish shawl. As Tim Armstrong has commented about the city in Sister Carrie, the city itself becomes an addiction in Dreiser: “the craving for light, luxury, commodities is a poison; the individual is ‘plugged in’ to its energies, desires, and rewards” (Armstrong 1998: 29).
Clyde’s values are thus shaped wholly by the lives he sees and by the objects he covets. In Lycurgus, he is aware, indeed hypervigilant, about the degree to which he is watched as “a Griffiths,” but as in his earlier identity as a bellhop, he does not escape the uniform of identity established by a social institution with which he is associated, whether the institution is the Green-Davidson or the Griffiths factory. He falls in love with Sondra because she, too, presents the spectacle of an identity; she “dressed awfully well, and was very rich and in society and her name and pictures were always in the paper,” Clyde testifies at his trial (Dreiser 1925/2000: 721), a celebrity that Clyde shares when Sondra falls in love with him. Later, of course, Clyde works equally hard at not being seen, as when he tries to pretend that Roberta is not traveling with him to Big Bittern Lake or when he escapes from the scene of Roberta’s drowning. In fact, he is amazed when a parade of witnesses testifies to his movements when he had “imagined himself unobserved” (p. 685). Even the instrument that the prosecution contends was used to kill Roberta is associated with an instrument of seeing: a camera. Fished up from the depths near Roberta’s body, the camera yields evidence both real and manufactured of Clyde’s presence: its ghostly images prove his relationship with Roberta, and the hairs planted between the lens and the lid by Burton Burleigh, a backwoodsman who wants to ensure Clyde’s conviction, attest falsely to his violence toward her. At Clyde’s trial, as at Gillette’s trial, all the evidence is circumstantial and suggestive of facts rather than definitive proof of them. Dreiser uses this sense of insubstantiality – of a personality first refracted through the lens of the city and then reconstituted through the recollections, real or imagined, of the witnesses and objects at his trial – to render Clyde as a figure of modern man, driven and defined by others. The best defense that his lawyers Belknap and Jephson can offer for him, in fact, is a variation of this idea: Clyde is, they tell the jury, a “mental as well as a moral coward” (p. 703) – in effect, a man as insubstantial and fictitious as the “Clifford Golden” alias he had used in his trip with Roberta. Clyde cannot “be a man” because the institutions that define him have given him personality but not character. Like that of Crane’s Maggie, whose individuality is erased and whose words are silenced by the forces of the city, Clyde’s personality, always inchoate and subject to external forces, is gradually erased. From pretending to a sophistication that he does not possess to court Sondra Finchley to adopting the “dummy or substitute for the real” (p. 662) story that his lawyers Belknap and Jephson concoct to defend him, Clyde collaborates in creating his fictitious selves until, progressively dehumanized by the machinery of the law and the prison system, he can only parrot the Reverend McMillan’s words about “the joy and pleasure of a Christian life” (p. 850) shortly before his death. As he walks to the electric chair, he hears his “voice sounding so strange and weak, even to himself, so far distant as though it emanated from another being walking alongside of him, and not from himself” (p. 852), but this is just the last in a series of dissociative states that he has experienced throughout his life as a character ruled by naturalistic forces.
Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods recounts a similar story of the innocent shaped and cast aside by the city, a familiar plot in naturalist texts. In it, Berry Hamilton, an African-American butler to the white landowner Maurice Oakley, is unjustly accused of a theft actually committed by Oakley’s brother-in-law, tried, and imprisoned, after which his family moves to New York and disintegrates into poverty and a rootless existence. Dunbar satirizes the plantation myth in the early pages of the novel as the Oakleys unhesitatingly consign Hamilton to prison despite his years of devoted service, an act that reveals their racism and the false depiction of the white landowner as benevolent paterfamilias. The Sport of the Gods follows the lives of Hamilton’s two children, Joe and Kitty, as both lose their innocence. Pursued by a married man, Kitty escapes by becoming a musical comedy star, a plot that recalls Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, while Joe’s lack of will in resisting the city’s pleasures recalls Clyde Griffiths’s plight. Bereft of his trade as a barber initially because of gossip about his father’s imprisonment, Joe takes refuge in the substitute family of the Banner Club saloon where, like Clyde, he is subject to the power of a dominant woman who loves him, the saloon singer Hattie. Settling passively into the life of Hattie’s kept man, Joe degenerates until Hattie throws him out, after which Joe murders her in a fit of anger. His rage frees him from years of inaction with a single incident of violent action, yet, like Clyde’s, Joe’s efforts are not only wrong but wrongly directed. Like Dreiser, Dunbar tries to suggest the dangers of the city, although his description of its pleasures belies his sermonizing about its perils: “the stream of young negro life would continue to flow up from the south, dashing itself against the hard necessities of the city and breaking like waves against a rock … until the gods grew tired of their cruel sport,” the narrator concludes (Dunbar 1902/2005: 414), yet as both Dreiser’s and Dunbar’s novels make clear, “the hard necessities of the city” cannot dissuade those like Clyde Griffiths and Joe Hamilton whom the city fascinates with its pleasures. If modernity is spectacle, they wish not only to view it but to be part of it, and this desire leads to a fatal immersion in the city as an organism.
Although many naturalist authors addressed working-class lives, Jack London and Anzia Yezierska infused their writing with a more physical, visceral sense of poverty’s effects than most. Both vividly render not only the backbreaking labor of the poor but the hunger, dirt, and despair that separate their characters, who are poverty-stricken outsiders, from the material and intellectual wealth surrounding them. Although he never lost interest in chronicling human nature and its reversion to primitive behavior under the stress of extreme and inhospitable environments, whether that included the frozen Yukon of the Northland stories or the toxic tropics in the South Seas stories, London also published social fiction and nonfiction such as The People of the Abyss, an ethnographic study of the slums of east London. He was also deeply influenced by the potential for human betterment implied by the writings of Herbert Spencer, whose First Principles, he said, had “done more for mankind … than a thousand books like Nicholas Nickleby … and Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (London 1988: 104) and whose ideas are a central theme in Martin Eden. London’s Martin Eden, like Yezierska’s Bread Givers, is an autobiographical or self-ethnographic piece of fiction that casts a cold eye on the success narrative of working-class upward mobility.
In Martin Eden, the roughneck sailor Martin is introduced into a middle-class culture that has as its avatar Ruth Morse, whose angelic blonde looks and university education initially hide her fundamental philistinism. Spurred by his love for Ruth and his determination to work with his brains, not his hands, Martin undertakes a breathtakingly intense self-education program of reading and writing, interrupted only by equally intense intervals of backbreaking labor, such as a stint working in a laundry, sweating through hours of “nerve-racking, body-destroying toil” (London 1993: 195) so that “on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool white” could “[sip] iced drinks” to keep “their circulation down” (p. 194). At first humbled by the cultural sophistication of the Morses and their friends, Martin comes to see their perspective as fundamentally shallow, and, worse, dishonest, especially after he discovers the intellectual delights of socialism and Russ Brissenden, a cynical but honest poet. After years of poverty, Martin gains fame but loses his sense of self. Sickened by the hypocrisy of those who once spurned him but now want to cash in on his fame, including Ruth, Martin returns again and again to two things: desire for a “patriarchal grass house” in Tahiti (p. 420), the quintessential escape from civilization; and repulsion at those who praise him for what he repeatedly calls “work performed” (p. 446). Like Clyde Griffiths, he experiences these visions of the future and the past as psychological and visual interruptions, nearly hallucinations, from an intolerable present reality. Separated from those in his own class, like the working girl Lizzie Connolly, and disgusted by the middle-class pseudointellectuals whom he had originally revered, Martin has nowhere to go. In one final act of will, he slips out of a porthole on the steamer carrying him to Tahiti and drowns himself. Like that of Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, his drowning is at once an affirmation and a negation: it affirms his will and control over his body, but it derives from a disillusionment with society so complete that death is preferable to living among people.
Yezierska’s Bread-Givers, like Martin Eden, is an autobiographical tale of escaping poverty through hard work. Its protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, fights her way out of the Hester Street ghetto despite being hampered by her domineering father, Reb Smolinsky, whose invocations of Jewish tradition barely conceal his monstrous selfishness. Like Ruth Morse, whose idea of improving Martin is to force him into a mundane job so that he will support her, Sara’s father wants to make her into an ideal daughter, a docile breadwinner who submits to him in everything and supports him in as much luxury as she can manage. Refusing to be bullied into an unsuitable marriage, as her sisters have been, Sara moves out to attend night school. She accomplishes this feat, as Martin does, by working in a laundry to fund her intellectual pursuits. Like London, Yezierska uses laundry work to emphasize the gulf between working people and the leisure class: when Sara attends a physical education class at college after working hard all day in the laundry, she finds herself “dripping with sweat worse than Saturday night in the steam laundry” (Yezierska 1925/1999: 216), highlighting the difference between those who build up their bodies for recreation and those who use every scrap of muscle simply to survive a brutal working environment. A characteristically naturalistic environment in its squalor, Sara’s room is crowded with dilapidated furniture and the grime of poverty, with the “thick dirt” and “mud of ages” (p. 162) encrusted on the window depriving her of light and air. But for Sara it is, actually and metaphorically, the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf had proposed as necessary to an intellectual life, and Sara sets an ambitious course of study for herself. Like Martin, she feels the pangs of physical as well as intellectual hunger, the former subsiding as the latter is satiated, and, like him, she too falls in love with someone socially and intellectually above her, Hugo Seelig. As Seelig helps Sara to erase her accent, and with it the exterior, audible ties with her ethnicity, Sara returns to her past. She asks her father, now living in poverty since no one will support him, to live with her. In doing so, she discovers that she still bears the burden of “the generations who made my father” (p. 297) and unlike Martin Eden, she is able both to rise from her origins and to embrace them as part of the person she has become.
Within the work of Norris and Wharton, Crane and Chopin, Dreiser and Dunbar, and London and Yezierska, then, naturalism responds to the crisis of modernity in ways that deserve the title of modernism. In addition to exploring the forces of heredity and environment, their transformation of Zola and of Howellsian realism for a modern context, their stylistic experiments and daring treatment of sexuality, their examination of the lure of the city, and their chronicling of poverty and working-class lives help to identify these authors as naturalistic. Moreover, in shedding and remaking class-bound, gendered, and ethnic identities, that rite of self-conscious modernity, their characters negotiate environments that range from bewilderingly hostile to indifferent, often urban spaces in which they are more frequently trapped by the forces of desire or poverty than by the physical boundaries of the place. For Crane, Norris, Wharton, Dunbar, and Chopin, the environment reinforces the divide between natural and unnatural, the supposedly innocent and the dubiously corrupt, as characters follow the naturalistic plot of decline based less on their circumstances alone than upon some way in which they have failed the Darwinian test of evolutionary adaptation. Some, like McTeague, are atavistic remnants of an earlier time whose grasp of modernity is always tenuous; others, like Joe Hamilton and Lily Bart, have been shaped for a different sort of environment and are unable to adapt successfully. In later works, such as those by Dreiser, London, and Yezierska, working-class backgrounds thwart characters who try to infiltrate a class-bound culture marked as modern by its use of language, literacy, and technology. Class mobility in the form of racial, ethnic, or class-based passing is not part of the performative vocabulary of Clyde Griffiths, Martin Eden, or Sara Smolinsky, for despite their efforts, they are marked in a seemingly indelible manner by their early environment, a past that haunts them despite their best efforts to escape it. The naturalistic plots and themes of these novels capture a particular moment in time, one in which the crisis of modernity was represented through radical ideas but a less than radically realist style, despite Crane’s impressionism and the experiments of London and Dreiser with representing alternative states of consciousness. Naturalism in the hands of such writers reveals itself as more than the deterministic and materialistic universe implied by simple definitions. Rather, it is a surprisingly flexible and useful means of treating modernity in the turn-of-the-century novel, and is, in fact, a type of modernism avant la lettre, one that promotes a realistic immersion in details that Woolf rejected, but in doing so found a way to chronicle the shifting currents of turn-of-the-century life.
NOTES
1 Robert Morace identifies four ways in which Norris connected with his audience at The Wave: its status as a magazine, which meant that its value lay not in currency but in “various literary ‘tricks’ ”; the “relationship in time” between Norris’s pieces and lectures, concerts, and other events in San Francisco; the geographic specificity of the San Francisco location; and the first-hand knowledge that Norris had of upper-class social life (Morace 1980: 55).
2 For Norris’s extant themes and the text of the grader’s comments see Hart (1970); for commentary on these see McElrath and Crisler (1974: 153–87).
3 References to Crane’s knowledge of Zola appear in the unreliable biography Stephen Crane by Thomas Beer but are not substantiated elsewhere except in sources possibly influenced by Beer. See Paul Sorrentino’s account of Crane’s reading in Stephen Crane Remembered (2006: 331). On the unreliability of letters purported by Beer to have been written by Crane, see Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino’s introduction to Crane’s letters (Crane 1988).
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Armstrong, Tim. (1998). Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, Tim. (2005). Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Becker, George J. (1963). Modern realism as a literary movement. In George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism (pp. 3–38). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Campbell, Donna. (1997). Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Chopin, Kate. (2006). The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Cowley, Malcolm. (1947/1998). “Not Men”: A natural history of American naturalism. In Donald Pizer (ed.), Documents of American Realism and Naturalism (pp. 225–38). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Crane’s defective impressionism. (1898/1973). In Richard M. Weatherford (ed.), Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (pp. 218–19). London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Crane, Stephen. (1984a). Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (pp. 7–78). New York: Library of America.
Crane, Stephen. (1984b). The Red Badge of Courage. In Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (pp. 79–212). New York: Library of America.
Crane, Stephen. (1988). The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino. New York: Columbia University Press.
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